Cloud storage services offer a minimum amount of free space to everyone who signs up, but you can often get more. You can upgrade your cloud drive with gigabytes and gigabytes of free space in a few easy steps, often just by referring friends to your service of choice.

The free space you can get using these methods doesn’t expire. You’ll have the space forever – or at least until the service decides to take it away or close its doors. For maximum free space, use multiple services and rack up free space with each. You could have over 100GB of free space if you took advantage of all the offers here.

Refer Friends: Refer friends to Dropbox and you’ll get an additional 500MB of free space every time someone creates an account after following your referral link. You can earn a maximum of 16GB this way.

Camera Upload: Enable the Camera Upload feature on your phone or computer to automatically upload photos you take to Dropbox. If you do, you’ll get up to 3GB of free space.

Social Media: You can earn 125MB each for connecting your Facebook and Twitter accounts to Dropbox, following Dropbox on Twitter, and giving Dropbox your feedback.

Take the Tour: If you never took the getting started tour when you created a Dropbox account, you can take it now for a free 250MB of space.

Participate in Scavenger Hunts and Beta Tests: Dropbox has run “Dropquest” scavenger hunts where users can earn free space by solving puzzles (or just looking up a walkthrough online). They’ve also given away 5GB of space to users who participated in beta testing new features. Keep your eyes peeled for future scavenger hunts, beta tests, other events, and new features.

SkyDrive

Microsoft’s SkyDrive doesn’t offer a referral program or another way to earn free space at the moment. However, it does come with 7GB of space by default – more than Google Drive and Dropbox offer.

Google Drive

Google Drive doesn’t have any sort of referral program, so you can’t get additional free space. You’re stuck with the standard 5GB unless you want to pay for additional storage. However, some files aren’t counted to your space limit.

Use Google Docs: Files you store in Google Docs format (documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) don’t count towards your storage limit. If you have any documents in other formats, such as Office or OpenDocument formats, convert them to Docs files and you’ll free up some space.

Manage Your Photos: Your 5GB of space is actually shared between your Google Drive and Google+ Photos (formerly Picasa Web Albums). However, photos and videos under a certain size aren’t counted towards your storage limits. In other words, you can store an unlimited number of these photos and videos for free. Google has more information about the types of photos and videos that you can store for free. To get more space, try shrinking or deleting some photos.

Buy a Chromebook: Chromebooks come with a sizable bonus amount of Google Drive storage space. It’s not quite free – you have to buy a Chromebook – but if you’re so inclined, you can get a free 100GB of Google Drive space for two years by purchasing the $249 Samsung Series 3 ChromebookSamsung Chromebook Series 3 Review and GiveawaySamsung Chromebook Series 3 Review and GiveawayPeople today are constantly on the move and connected to the Internet, doing anything from creating presentations to checking emails to chatting with friends to playing games. People use all sorts of devices to accomplish...Read More. That’s a $120 value – almost half the price of the Chromebook itself. You could also get 1TB of space for three years by purchasing a Chromebook Pixel for $1,300 – it’s actually cheaper to get the storage by buying the Pixel than by purchasing the storage alone. However, if you’re purchasing a Chromebook Pixel, you probably don’t care about money (sorry Google, but the Pixel is just too expensive for what it offers).

Refer Friends: You can get an additional 500 MB for each person you refer, up to a maximum of an additional 20GB. That’s a total of 25GB you can get for free. Log into your account on the Ubuntu One website to get your referral link.

If you’re a Box user craving more free space, stay tuned for future deals – you just may pick up 50GB of space and put the other services here to shame in raw numbers. However, Box is a more limited service and restricts files you can store to 250MB each. It’s not as flexible as other services, so that 50GB will be more difficult to use.

With Otixo, you can pull these and more cloud storage services into a single app so you have one big cloud hard drive for all your files. It's like your Finder or Windows file explorer for all your files online.

you should also consider a new kid in town. COPY! It's a new cloud storage service starting from 10GB FREE here: http://goo.gl/uAfs9 but hurry up before they drop this generous launch offer Copy is from Barracuda networks, a reliable network appliance and security company coming into data storage. it seems like a better setup to me; as long as it is not a proof of concept, I think it will last

Just got some free storage space in Dropbox because of this, thanks! I also grabbed that 50GB of free Box storage, and had two Hotmail accounts set up before the deadline, so both of those have the 25GB of storage.

I have at the moment 24 GB on my private free Dropbox account (have a paid for work) after referrals, been a "guru", Dropquest, participated in thing on their blog. Nice space. Sugarsync is a bit more generous with referral space and I now have 44 GB there. This is my main sync services. Have also signed up for Box when 50 GB was offered, Skydrive .. but use them mostly for a second backup for files or photos

There is a new service out there https://www.copy.com/home/ They also offere referral and bonus when sign in using a referral link. Check put e.g. twitter for referral links if you want to join.

MEGA gives 50GB free it's very fast and modern. Even with non-US servers files I can download 2.1MB/s maxing out my ADSL 20MBPS internet connection. Works great as an additional backup for less critical files go with Dropbox but use both (a backup for a backup)

MEGA gives 50GB free it's very fast and modern. Even with non-US servers files I can download 2.1MB/s maxing out my ADSL 20MBPS internet connection. Works great as an additional backup for less critical files go with Dropbox but use both (a backup for a backup)

Really, unless you're shipping a hard disk to a service to have them load your files, anything over 25-50GB is about all you can use at DSL speeds for uploading. And that will take God knows how long to load.

I have 1.5TB of files so only critical stuff will eventually be uploaded to the services I have. I have Google Drive, SkyDrive, and a couple others to use as well as Box. so I probably have a total of around 70-75GB available.

Thanks for the pointer -- I gave it a try -- set up at Fetchnotes and accessed Box from there -- but alas, only 5GB for free. Oh well... next time...

Julian Altshul

March 13, 2013 at 11:30 pm

If you buy a Galaxy Note 2 (on the 3 Network in the UK, at least) it comes bundled with 50GB of free Dropbox storage - in addition to any storage you already have. The catch? You get the free space for 2 years. After that, Dropbox must be betting that most people will have filled lots of the free space and will choose to pay up, in order to keep it. I probably will, when my trial period runs out. I currently have 59GB of free space, and I've filled nearly 33% of it.

Does anyone know if this bonus is available with the Note 2 in all countries and with all carriers, or this a very specific deal?